Natural Rhythm: La Parisienne Dances with Darwin: 1875-1910

The essay looks at the influence of minstrels, Africans, and black American dancers on white stars of the Parisian café- concert and music-hall between 1877 and 1908. The arrival of the first black performers coincided with the tremendous popular interest in Darwinism and in Charcot's hysterics. The effect of this simultaneity was to create an amalgam in the popular imagination. This amalgam of the hysteric and the savage enjoyed its most extravagant representations on music-hall stages in the person of the epileptic singer, a genre invented in 1875. Popular spectacle thus played a powerful role in forging images of the primitive and making those images a central part of the aesthetics of modernity taking shape in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.